


Soft Hair, Soft Hearts

by hufflepirate



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Cats, Comfort, Emotional Constipation, Fluff, Gen, Hair Brushing, Hair Washing, Platonic Relationships, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, trigger warning for cat vomit I guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-27 23:09:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16229228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: Nott is most comfortable when all her friends are away from water. Caleb is most comfortable when he's pretending not to care about people. Somehow, letting him wash her hair is comfortable in spite of it all.(Some canon-typical cuss words, but still gen.)





	Soft Hair, Soft Hearts

As soon as the others returned from bathing, Nott felt relief wash over her. She'd known that the shrieks she'd heard coming from the stream were probably happy shrieks, and she'd known that she shouldn't worry after they'd assured her it was a perfectly _safe_ stream, but all the same, the shrieks had carried better than the laughter, and it wasn't-

She dug her hand into her pile of buttons one more time, squeezing a handful of them together hard enough to feel the edges digging into her palm and fingers, and then she started sorting them in earnest, pretending that was what she'd been doing all along.

Frumpkin tried to steal a particularly shiny brass button from a military dress uniform, batting it out of the pile with purpose, but Nott snagged it back from him just before he could get it into his mouth, snarling to make a point. The cat, as usual, seemed unbothered by her bared teeth, but stared over at Caleb as if to ask if he could please stop trying to cheer her up now.

She wasn't sure how she felt about being so uncomfortable that Caleb had noticed, but there _had_ been _water_ involved, and after all the trouble they'd had along the coast, she still wasn't sure why the others hadn't picked up a totally reasonable, rational fear of water themselves, so maybe it was their problem, not hers. And anyway, at least he hadn't _said_ anything. She could pretend the cat just liked her. Or that he just liked buttons.

Frumpkin gave a half-hearted hiss and slunk backward, but didn't get too far away, so she assumed he hadn't gotten an answer from Caleb one way or the other.

Caleb still wasn't looking at either of them from where he sat, a few yards away, which she could have pretended was because he was focused on the others returning, if he hadn't also been decidedly not looking at them while the others were gone.

Jester and Beau were talking about something, but she couldn't follow what, exactly, because they kept laughing in the middle of words. Whatever it was, it had Fjord grinning softly as he walked into camp behind them, Caduceus taking up the rear and talking to Yasha.

Jester dropped the smaller bag she'd taken to the river onto the ground next to her haversack, and she and Beau sat down beside it almost as quickly, still laughing as they both combed their still-damp hair out.

It was always strange to see Beau with her hair down, and even stranger to see her combing it out gently like this, instead of running a brush wildly through it just long enough to pull it back up into its knot and out of her way.

Nott didn't realize she was staring until a clatter beside her drew her attention back to Frumpkin, who was in the middle of the pile and had obviously just swallowed a mouthful of buttons.

"Hey!" she shouted, diving toward the cat, "No!"

The cat bolted and she chased after him, not stopping to put her buttons back in her bag.

"Frumpkin!" Caleb shouted, and the cat turned abruptly, running over to the wizard and leaping up onto his shoulder, making him wince as the claws dug in.

Nott chased Frumpkin up to Caleb. "He ate my buttons!"

Caleb frowned.

Behind Nott, Jester giggled.

"Oh shit," Beau said, "Do fey creatures even poop? Can you get them back?"

Caleb's forehead tensed further, concerned, and Jester laughed again.

All of a sudden, Frumpkin hunched his back, made a horrible retching sound, and vomited straight into the side of Caleb's head.

"Eww!" Jester shouted. She sounded delighted, and for a moment, Nott felt a smile pulling at the edges of her own mouth, before Caleb heaved a heavy sigh, closing his eyes and flinging his head back, and she forced the smile away.

"Oh no, Caleb," she asked, "Did it get in your ear?"

He sighed again. "No. I am alright."

Frumpkin made a satisfied little "mrrp," still perched on Caleb's shoulder, and the wizard reached up to grab the cat and put him down on the ground again. Then he picked the buttons out of the mess caught between his neck and his shirt collar and got to his feet. "I'll wash these off, too," he said, sounding exhausted.

Nott wasn't sure what to say, but now that Frumpkin was on the ground, he'd gone back to eyeing the button pile, which was as good an excuse as any not to say anything at all.

"Not this time, cat!" she exclaimed, dashing forward at full speed to beat Frumpkin back to her pile and scoop it back into its bag.

Caleb was gone just long enough for her to start worrying before he came back, with half of his head and a good portion of his shoulder wet, and slumped sheepishly up to Jester and Beau. "Jester, I -" he pointed down at the bag sitting beside her, "May I borrow-"

Jester interrupted, her eyes lighting up, "Oh, yes, of course, Caleb! It will make you smell _so nice_! You can use anything you want!"

He blushed faintly as he grabbed the bag and then retreated back through the little bit of woods that separated them from the stream.

The buttons were clearly a hazard, so she tucked them away and started counting her crossbow bolts instead, trying not to think about Caleb off _alone_ in a body of water, however "shallow" and "safe" it was supposed to be.

It was a relief when he snuck quietly back into camp, drawing the others' attention only as he grabbed something out of the back of their new cart with a clang and then retreated back into the woods without saying anything.

Nott grunted under her breath at no one. Maybe she should go after him. Maybe she should sit by the stream, just in case. It would be better than staying here and worrying. Wouldn't it? But Caleb hadn't asked her to come, and it would mean probably, maybe having to _talk_ about the water, and as much as she thought it would be good for all of them if they talked about things more, this was - well, she'd said what she needed to say about water already. Probably.

She allowed herself one discontented growl, quiet enough for the others not to hear, and ran her fingers over the fletching of the bolts in front of her, starting over as she realized she'd lost count and trying not to let the tension show in her shoulders.

She was very nearly done counting when she heard Caleb's voice in her ear.

"Nott," he began, saying her name crisply, almost sharply, like he was tense. Her stomach tightened in the moment's pause that came after it, before he added, "Can you please come meet me by the stream," the words all running together. "I -" he stopped again. "You _can_ reply to this message.

"I'm coming, Caleb!" she answered, almost reflexively. She half wished she'd sent it back as a message of her own, so that she could have heard his response, but either way, he sounded more tense than scared, and she'd have to believe that was good enough until she could catch up to him and make sure he was alright.

"Is something wrong?" Fjord asked as she bolted past him.

"I'll let you know!" she answered.

She heard more than saw Fjord getting up behind her, but she couldn't bring herself to worry about it, running through the woods to get to the stream.

The moment she burst out onto the bank of the stream, it was obvious that Caleb was fine. He wasn't even in the water. He was standing on the bank in his undershirt and trousers, everything else lying in a pile a few feet away.

She only vaguely heard Fjord in the woods behind her, but Caleb wasn't quite looking at her, and he wasn't quite looking at the part of the woods where she could hear Fjord, and whatever this was, she was reaching for her copper wire as much by instinct as anything.

"He's fine," she messaged to Fjord, "Abort mission. You don't need to come over here. We're both fine."

All she got in response was a vaguely positive-sounding grunt, and she wasn't sure whether Fjord remembered he could answer or not, but it didn't sound like he was coming any closer, and that was good enough for her.

"Oh," Caleb said, "You were worried." He muttered something in Zemnian, maybe an apology, and scratched at the back of his neck.

"I'm always worried," she said, the words spilling out before she could stop them. Caleb blushed and she stepped forward to punch him in the elbow, like she'd seen Beau do. "I'm joking," she said, unconvincingly, "I'm only worried about you when you get hurt. Or when you're in the _water_. The rest of the time I know you're very strong."

Caleb at least smiled at that, even if the blush didn't entirely go away. "Ja, well, I think I can understand that, given your - _thing_ with water."

"It's not so bad now that we're not on _boats_ ," she said.

The smile was bigger now, and Caleb managed to meet her eyes. "Yes. I will - not miss that, I don't think. Not with how it turned out."

"It _was_ pretty cool when we thought _we_ were pirates," she answered, "Until the part where the _real_ pirates showed up."

"Well, maybe we can be land pirates now."

Nott thought about it for a second, face sliding into a grin. "We could get a flag for the cart. Jester could paint a _skull_ on it. And maybe some donuts. And a penis."

"Ah, yes, the donut cock pirates, terror of the - eh - the roadways."

He looked calmer now. Good. Maybe she could start to figure out why he'd called for her, then.

"Are you really alright?" she asked.

Caleb looked just to the right of her eyes again, not meeting her glance. "Yes. I am fine. I was just thinking -"

He paused again, and she raised an eyebrow.

"I was watching you look at the girls when they came back from their bath," he said, "And then I had to wash my hair because there was that vomit in it, and I was thinking that you can't really feel the water as much when it's only your hair, and you don't _have_ to really go _in_ the water, and I was thinking about how you looked when the others were combing their hair out and so then I got this washbasin out of the back of the cart, the one we stole from that terrible inn where the innkeeper was an asshole, and I wondered if you would like it if I washed your hair for you?"

For a moment, she was so surprised she couldn't even begin to respond, and Caleb immediately took the silence poorly.

"You don't have to, of course!" he said, backtracking furiously, "We can just stay here for a little bit and pretend I called you over to give you back the buttons now that they are clean, and then nobody will have to know I asked you and it will not be weird."

Nott's head was still spinning a little. She wasn't sure she _wanted_ to be girly, really, but Beau wasn't exactly girly, either, and she'd seemed - well, she'd seemed _something_ with her hair down, longer than Jester's where it wasn't shaved, and she and Jester had both seemed _something_ sitting like that, doing their hair, and it hadn't seemed like a bad something, necessarily.

"We will just go back," Caleb said, whirling around and squatting down to rifle through his coat for the pocket with her buttons in it, "Forget I asked, I just-"

"No," Nott interrupted, "It sounds - it sounds kind of nice, actually. If I don't have to actually go into the water, it sounds like it might be nice."

"Oh," Caleb said, stilling abruptly. "Alright."

His hands started moving again, more calmly, this time, and he retrieved three round bone buttons out of his pocket like he'd known where they were to begin with and just hadn't been calm enough to grab them. Then he stood up, dusted off the knees of his trousers even though they hadn't touched the ground, and stepped over to hand her the buttons. "Take these anyway," he said, "I'm sorry Frumpkin ate them."

"It's alright," Nott said, "You were only trying to help."

Caleb laughed, a sharp, surprised bark halfway under his breath. "You caught that, then."

She smiled, leaning affectionately into his hip for a moment. "I appreciated it."

"Well, that's good, then."

"So how _do_ you wash somebody's hair without getting in the water?" she asked him.

He rubbed absently at the back of his head again. "Ah. Yes. I - have been working that out, I think."

It took a lot of rearranging and twisting and turning and trying not to knock the basin of water over, but eventually they managed to find a comfortable enough position with her head in the basin and the basin in Caleb's lap.

"I borrowed Jester's fancy hair soap. I - she said I could use whatever I wanted, so I assume that counts for you as well, and anyway, I did not need it for me."

"Caleb, if your regular soap is good enough for you, it's good enough for me!"

Caleb made a soft sound in the back of his throat and she wasn't sure what it meant now that she was turned where she couldn't see his face. "Nein. We are going to use the good stuff. Your hair is a lot longer than mine anyway."

She might have protested if she hadn't been able to hear him tapping the mouth of the bottle against his hand, or if there hadn't been a little part of her, down deep, that liked the thought of fancy hair soap.

"You have to tell me if I accidentally pull your hair," Caleb said seriously, "I am going to try very hard not to."

"I will," she agreed.

This time, the soft answering grunt was as clear as a word would have been. A moment later, he placed his fingers gently against her temple and then slid them backward against her scalp, running them into her hair until he found some kind of tangle and stopped before she could feel anything more than a little bit of pressure.

"Hmm," he said thoughtfully, "Perhaps we should have combed it first. But I've already got the soap in it, so I will just have to be careful."

Nott grinned, rolling her eyes, and twisted her head around to look at Caleb's face. Even upside-down she could tell he had a little wrinkle between his eyes. "Don't worry. I'm not _breakable_."

The smile that answered her was instantaneous. "I know. But I'm trying to be _fancy_ with the fancy hair soap."

She snorted. "Well that's silly. Both of us are bad at that."

He snorted back, reaching his other hand under the water and pressing lightly on her head, to turn it away from him. "Don't twist around so far," he ordered, "I don't want to get the fancy soap in your eyes."

The whole process took longer than she thought it would, and she couldn't tell how much was Caleb being over-cautious and how much was just him picking up on how relaxed it made her feel. That was a surprise, too. She'd thought she would be uncomfortable, but with the water just on her scalp, she felt drier than she did sometimes in rainstorms, and they'd managed a position that only gave her a little bit of a crick in her neck.

Instead, she felt tension she didn't even know she had easing away from her as Caleb's fingers rubbed gentle circles into her scalp, stopping occasionally when he got too caught up in tangles. He even seemed to sense when her neck got a little bit sore, because then, for a few moments, it felt more like he was massaging the base of her skull than really washing anything.

By the time the circles stopped, even her back and shoulders were somehow lax and easy.

"Hmm," Caleb hummed to himself, moving his fingers back to her temple and running them through her hair again, a little farther this time before the faint tug that meant he'd found a tangle, but she wasn't sure what he was thinking about.

"Hmm," she hummed back, like replacing a question sound with an answer sound would mean something.

Caleb's snort sounded fond. "Are you alright? This still feels ok?"

She tipped her head back to look at him, again. "Yeah, it feels great! I never knew you were so good at hair, Caleb. You could be a barber!"

This time, the snort was accompanied by a faint blush, and she looked back up at the sky again with a smile on her face. He didn't believe her when she gave him compliments. She wanted him to believe her. But at least she'd managed to get a good one in while he was being so nice.

He continued combing his fingers through her hair, brushing lightly against her scalp and then pulling along until the tangles got to be too much and returning to her scalp to start again, and somehow it was even more soothing than the circles had been, and she began to wonder if she might fall asleep like this, even with her head in the water.

Her eyes drifted shut, and then time was even harder to gauge. She had no idea how long Caleb was working his hands through her hair before he could run his fingers all the way from the crown of her head to the tips of her hair, floating in the basin, but she did know that when he finally stopped and she opened her eyes, the light was different, the sun closer to setting than it had been before.

She started sitting up, but Caleb reached forward and put a hand on her shoulder. "Wait. I - just give me a minute, ja?"

She leaned back down.

Caleb cleared his throat awkwardly. "Ah, um, Jester. Which bottle is the thing for making the hair very soft, and do you mind if I use it? You can reply to this message."

Nott couldn't hear the answer, but as she tipped her head back again to watch Caleb's face, she could guess at it. He was starting to blush again, for the millionth time, and by now she could spot a Jester-is-laughing-at-me blush from a mile away.

Whatever words had gone with the laugh apparently required an answer, because he held the copper wire up again and said, "Thank you, yes, I will do it myself, though, thank you."

This time, he didn't invite Jester to reply, but something in his face made Nott think she had anyway.

"I -" Caleb started, "I thought maybe it would be good - your hair is already very nice, but I was not sure if there would be a chance again for all of the really fancy stuff, so I thought I would ask you-"

"Oh, sure," Nott said, beginning to wonder if Caleb was feeling guilty about something. If he was, she couldn't think what it might be. "Whatever you want, Caleb."

His blush darkened, and she expected the correction before it came. "Whatever _you_ want, Nott. That's what I'm - that's the point."

"Well, then I think I'd like my hair to be soft, if we're going to all this trouble of washing it."

"It is no trouble," Caleb answered, almost in a whisper.

"I know," she whispered back, "Not when it's us."

"Exactly."

That meant something. But she didn't know what to call it, and if _he_ knew what to call it, he probably only knew it in Zemnian, which wasn't any use, and she sat up enough to roll her neck and stretch it out while he pulled a new bottle out of Jester's bag and put it down beside them.

"Jester says I should make sure to rinse out your hair first, but I will need your help, I think, because I have this other bucket of clean water, but I don't think I can pour from it without hitting you in the face, at this angle. If you can hold the bottom of the bucket and tip it up, I can aim the water away from your face and make sure it's going the right place."

Rinsing her hair out was more of a two-person process, but even with the precariousness of it all, Caleb's free hand in her hair stayed gentle, combing through her hair again as he made sure the water was taking out all the rest of the soap.

Gradually, she sat up, taking full control over the bucket as Caleb grabbed quickly for the half-damp towel he'd brought with him at the start, sliding it up against the back of her neck before her wet hair could drip down her back.

She took it from him, keeping it wrapped tightly around her neck as she turned around to look at him.

He was gazing at the liquid in the bottle. "So, this goes in, and then we leave it for a little bit, and then we rinse it back out and then we comb your hair." He looked up at her as he finished the sentence.

"Did Jester say that?"

"Yes."

"Did she know it was _my_ hair?"

"No."

For a moment, silence stretched between them. Then Caleb broke it.

"She offered to come help. I think she was just making a joke."

If she was, it was the kind of joke she also made toward Fjord, though Nott was pretty sure Jester meant them differently. Either way, she wasn't about to tell that to _Caleb_.

"We could just go back, you know," Nott said.

"I thought you wanted to-"

"I want you to feel comfortable, Caleb. I feel very good right now, and I want you to feel good, too."

Caleb looked next to her eyes instead of into them. "That is very sweet, you are - We have been spending too much time with these losers, ja? We are going soft."

They'd always been going soft. She'd been going soft her whole life, one way or another. They'd been going soft together since the night she got him to sleep with his head in her lap in prison, just wanting him to feel safe and protected. She'd been soft then and he'd been so broken, even after all the healing he said he'd done before that, and he'd put himself back together, mostly, but there had always been soft places where the two of them bumped up against each other.

"Why don't you just comb my hair?" she asked, shooting for a compromise, "And then if that goes well, we don't need the fancy other stuff, and we can go back to the others."

He grinned, sideways and clever, and she found herself smiling back, just from relief that he was acting like himself again after a day of strange carefulness and maybe-guilt. "You are so smart, Nott. You act like you don't know what to do with people, sometimes but you are -" He waved his finger at her. "You are very smart, and I know what you are doing. Is that really what you want, or are you trying to placate me?"

"I want to have nice clean hair, because it has turned out that it feels nice, but I don't want to be out here forever when there's probably _food_ back at the camp by now."

Caleb snorted. "Yes, we do always seem to have that, now, don't we?"

"Best part of going soft."

"Absolutely."

He put the mystery bottle back in Jester's bag and pulled out a comb. "Let me stretch a bit before you sit back down and then I will dry your hair and get the rest of the tangles out."

Sitting in Caleb's lap and letting him comb her hair didn't make her feel _less_ like she might fall asleep, but at least now that it was getting late, her growling stomach kept her from giving in to the impulse. He didn't seem to be having trouble, really, and when he did hit the remaining tough snarls, he was careful not to let working on them hurt her.

Once he was done, the timing was somehow, in spite of all the extra time she hadn't expected all this to take, working out perfectly. Her stomach growled audibly, and his rumbled a moment later, like it was answering. They both laughed.

"I'll help you pack this back up," she said, "Go put your coat on before it gets chilly. We need to get back to the others before dinner."

Caleb laughed as he passed her, shoving lightly at her shoulder in that roughly affectionate way Beau sometimes did to him. "We are worrying about you, not about me. My hair has been dry for ages. And anyway, it is not _that_ cold yet. Not like it will be when we get farther north."

She picked up the basin and carried it over to the stream to dump it out into the water as Caleb put all his layers back on.

"You are definitely not allowed to wash my hair when it's _cold_. That makes water even _worse!_ "

She put the empty bucket in the basin and checked that Jester's bag was closed as Caleb came to collect all three rather unwieldy items.

"Not if it's all the way frozen over!" he said cheerfully, "Then you can ice skate."

"I don't know what that is."

Caleb set off into the woods, and she recognized the spring in his step as what it was - setting up an entrance to the camp that would look to the others like they'd been talking the whole time and not doing anything weird or soft or unexpected. "You and Beau will like it! You get to wear knife shoes."

"Ooh! Could I stab people with my feet?"

"They are not attached the right way for that, but you could slash at them, probably. Only then you would fall down, if you were not good at skating yet. I could probably slash at somebody for you."

"Oh, so you must be _very_ good, then, huh?"

"I am - good enough to teach the rest of you."

They were still talking about knife shoes when they walked into camp, and the others didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, but it might have been because they were all clustered around a pot of something that smelled _excellent_ and was obviously one of Duceus's creations.

Nott shoved her way into the circle between the two clerics, prompting Caduceus to give her food and Jester to compliment her hair, and then she got so wrapped up in both of those things that it took her several minutes to notice Caleb watching from the other side of the circle, looking calmer and happier than he had in days.

"Caleb!" she said cheerfully, "You should tell Beau about the knife shoes!"

Beau took the bait, and it was Nott's turn to watch fondly as Caleb explained it all again. There were lots of good parts of going soft, really. And soft hair wasn't the half of it.


End file.
